36 Central Park. \Ve found him to be a short, nut-colored man with wiry black hair and eyebrows, a broad brow, horn- rimmed glasses, and twinkling eyes. "\Vell, what shall I tell you?" Dr. Bronowski asked. \Ve inquired how he had come, with such evident success, to span the two cultures. "I was born in Poland, in 1908," he said. "I lived as a child in Germany. My family came to England in 1920, when I was twelve. I arrived speaking no English. I had a natural talent for mathematics, and also I discovered the word 'water' at the same time as the symbol 'H20.' From childhood, I was fascinated by the two languages into which I was thrust. Science is a partiCll- lar language for understanding nature. I had a very spectacular ad vantage, de- nied people who are brought up learn- ing English at their mother's knee and must find their way into science later. I came to both cultures at the same time-one of those extraordinary ad- vantages that bad luck always brings." \Ve asked him to continue with his autobiography. "I went to Cambridge, and Cam- bridge published my first book, 'The Poet's Defence,' " he said. "My second book, about Blake, is something of a landmark. Only then did I write my first book of science, which Harvard published-always very respectable publishers. The period in which I was a research student at Cambridge- from 1930 to 1933-was a time of exciting advances in physics: the break- ing up of the atomic nucleus by Cock- croft and \Valton, and Chadwick's dis- covery of the neutron. Ever since I was at M.LT. twelve years ago, it has been clear to me that We are at another great turning point in science-the elucidation of living matter in atomic terms-and also that there is a much more lively and active interest in science in this country than in England. You might say I'm part of the brain drain, but it's not really true, since I've reached that age when scientists become philosophers. Athens didn't simply dis- solve overnight when Socrates drank the hemlock." Dr. Bronowski paused for a moment, then said, "In January, 1964, I arrived in this country from England on a very snowy, bad-tempered evening, and there was a letter from the Museum of Natural History asking me to give these lectures. Since I had come over here to live but had no very clear idea of what work I wanted to do, this was wonderful. I could pull all the threads together. Science is a way of seeing the world-like the arts. The other night, an intelligent friend of mine said, 'You still haven't eXplained to me why I should want to know how the electric light or the telephone works.' The obvious answer is: \Vhy should I want to know how he works? REPAIRS SLOPPY WORK OONE CHEAP APRIL .'3, , 9 b 5 But so very many intelligent people still sit down with a book as if it held a se- cret for them, and regard nature as something quite different. They still be- lieve that if you pick up Dostoevski there is more than statements and sym- bols but that if you pick a chemistry handbook there are only facts. This is really quite an important point. That science is a vision of the world escapes some people. If the electric light doesn't work, they get someone in who can fix it, and half the people who are unhappy with their wives go to an analyst to fix that. That's as far as they go. Science is a great imaginative vision-again, like the arts-and a tremendous tribute to man's intellectual power over the last three hundred years. But matter and people have infinitely more ingenious connections than we shall ever guess. \Ve look in everything for truth but find only knowledge, and certainty we never find. Our brains do not work with certainties, and our senses are such that a wholly neutral, uninterpreted record never reaches us." Dr. Bronowski smiled and pressed his palms together beneath his chin. "\Ve know now that the brain does not work by ordinary logic, like a computer in the Pentagon, and that if it did, it would have to be fully as large as the Penta- gon. For a while, every physicist was trying to make models of the atom like small dynamos; it took fifty years to realize that dynamos are made of atoms-not the other way. And the brain makes logic-not the other way. Now, 'Crime and Punishment' doesn't read just like Newton's 'Optics.' If you read Newton, he asks you to immerse yourself in his vision in a different way-to agree-which Dostoevski does not. You can say, 'I see it the way Newton saw it, though not the way he first realized it.' Newton had a vision of how light was constructed that only a wildly original mind could have arrived at. I could live five hundred years and not have so ridiculous an idea, but very great men have very audacious ideas, in the sciences and in the arts. Science is every bit as bold and imaginative as the arts, but it has a way of formalizing its language, so that it can persuade others and be constantly checked by things that can be made to work. Literature gives no instructions, and appears to carry not one message but many, some of them conflicting. One of the theorems in Euclid is that an angle cannot be trisected with the ordinary tools of geometry-a compass and a ruler. But 'King Lear' was not written to tell us that you cannot trisect a kingdom. \Vhat makes literature exciting is not